Post by Police Moderator on Dec 7, 2010 5:41:13 GMT -5
Misgivings
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded
By TED WIDMER
December 6, 2010
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded
By TED WIDMER
December 6, 2010
Day after day, the ripples from Lincoln’s election continued to wash over Americans in different ways. Some proclaimed an ardent zeal for separation, and if necessary, war; most expressed abhorrence at the thought. And in one poetical soul, at least, there was an attempt to resolve these tensions. Isn’t that what poetry is for?
Herman Melville Herman Melville in 1860.
Herman Melville was not, at first glance, the writer most likely to achieve precision or economy in his poetry. Or, for that matter, to write poetry at all. The author of sprawling works like “Moby-Dick,” Melville had no problem generating language, but he was having trouble getting people to read what he had written. It had not been a good decade — “Moby-Dick” belly-flopped upon its release in 1851, and his sequel, “Pierre,” fared even worse. By the end of the 1850s, he was no longer able to support his wife and four children. In 1860, to restore his physical and mental equilibrium, Melville went on a long cruise to the Pacific, on a ship commanded by his brother Tom.
But the poet was in there. Melville had often inserted bits of verse inside his long romances (including “Moby-Dick”), and as the countercurrents of 1860 swirled around the United States, they swirled inside him as well. The grandson of Revolutionary heroes, he felt deeply about the Union — many have argued that “Moby-Dick” is an allegory about a nation that has lost its course. There are 30 sailors on board the Pequod, “federated along one keel,” just as there were 30 states at the time of writing.
Like so many Americans, he was feeling elegiac in the fall of 1860, missing something that seemed to have vanished, even before secession made it official. Lincoln was elected on Nov. 6. On Nov. 8, while still at sea, he read these lines of Schiller, about love, but also descriptive of the fraternal bonds that had once united the states:
- Can those sweet longing hopes, which make
Love’s essence, thus decay?
Can that be love which doth forsake? —
That love — which fades away?
Read more: ny times